


heartbeat (hard feat)

by plalligator



Category: Within the Wires (Podcast)
Genre: Female Character of Color, Gen, POV Second Person, Pre-Relationship, Recovery, Season/Series 01 Spoilers, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-08 11:04:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8842255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plalligator/pseuds/plalligator
Summary: You are alone.
You are not fine.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Culumacilinte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Culumacilinte/gifts).



> happy yuletide! i hope this fits with your prompt...like you said, oleta has a lot of emotional stuff to work through relating to herself, hester, and their relationship, and i did my best to reflect that
> 
> title is from eliza rickman's song 'o, you sinners' which i listened to because of welcome to night vale!

You are alone.

You are not fine. You have nightmares about the sounds of carpentry and clattering legs moving beneath the skin of your abdomen. Your side aches, the y-shaped scar tender and misshapen where it was cut open again.

You drink cups of coffee so sleep will not claim you. You are afraid if you fall asleep you will wake up strapped to a table, body numb and immobile. You remind yourself to breathe. It helps to remind yourself to breathe.

You are alone.

You are not fine. But it is fine that you are not fine. There is space for you to not be fine.

::

The cottage by the sea belongs to someone who knows you very well. This person knows things about you that you yourself do not know. This person remembers what you were like as a child.

You do not know this person. 

No—this is incorrect. You do know this person. You know this person as a friendly stranger in a park and as a soothing voice in your ear. But you do not know this person as a person; as an individual.

The bookshelves in the cottage are full of books about paintings; big, heavy books with glossy full-color illustrations. You do not know much about paintings. You like paintings, of course, in an vague way. Everyone likes paintings. But you do not know much about them, except, now, that you do not want to be studied as if you were a painting ever again. 

You do not feel like a painting. You feel like a miswired circuit. All your electrical signals are firing wrong, your mind and your body severed from each other. 

You do not look at the books about paintings. You do not do much at all, those first few days. You take your antibiotics, and eat peanut butter on toast, and lie in bed without sleeping. 

You remind yourself to breathe.

You remind yourself to breathe. 

You explore the cottage to distract yourself. There is something intimate and strange about being in someone's house when they are not there. Their private life is laid bare in front of you; the contents of cabinets and drawers spilling their secrets like eggs cracked open. 

A sun hat hanging by the door. A tin of old tea bags on the pantry shelf, along with a jar of fossilized sugar. A wool blanket for cold nights in the closet. A book of crosswords, half-finished. Clothes that do not fit you; sundresses and worn-out jeans and mismatched socks and practical cotton bras. 

Besides the books about paintings, there is also a shelf of beat-up paperbacks arranged alphabetically by author. This makes you feel better. Your own apartment had plenty of beat-up paperbacks, although you did not alphabetize yours by author. Yours was a system based on whim and arbitrary preference. The person these bookshelves belong to has been very careful not to let any favoritism leak through in their organization. 

You wonder, if you asked her, which she would say was her favorite. 

You wonder if this how she felt, watching you run by in the park all those times. Gathering observations like puzzle pieces, trying to form a picture of the person you’d become. 

::

There are sneakers in the closet by the door, but they are too small for you. You have to go into town to get a new pair. It is a small town, and people are curious about you.

You were very sick, you say. Your sunken eyes and the grey tint to your normally warm brown skin confirms this. You had to have surgery. It was very difficult. You are here in this tiny town by the seashore to recover. You are renting the cottage on the beach from a friend. Here you will rest, and take in nature, until you are back to your old self.

When you get back from town you put on your new sneakers and go for a run along the beach. It does not go well. Your breath fights you, clawing its way out of your lungs. Your legs, which used to carry you forward like pistons charging along, are weak and wobbly. The y-shaped scar on your abdomen hurts as the momentum of your body pulls the skin around it.

However—your body, drained of energy, abandons you to sleep: the heavy, rich sleep of physical exhaustion. You are reminded that you have mastery over your body. There is power in this.

::

You wait. You go slow, even though you do not want to go slow, running a little and stopping to walk. You are careful to eat the right foods—proteins, carbs, foods rich in calories to provide your body with the needed energy—and to stretch your sore muscles every night. Eventually, you stop having to walk anymore. You go for runs along the beach, calves aching in the shifting sand. You run to town and back, breath coming in harsh pants, further and further every day. Every stitch in your side, every knotted muscle is the price of your body relearning itself, relearning its capabilities and its limits. 

When you’re running, you don’t need to remind yourself to breathe. Your body does that for you, lungs pumping automatically in response to your body’s need: short, regular breaths that push out carbon dioxide and bring fresh oxygen to your bloodstream. You don’t need to fight to clear your mind; exertion wipes it clean. You always loved about running, the way your thoughts became unmoored and you could sink into the motion and submerge yourself. You used to go for runs the night before you had exams, when you had been staring at books for hours and the jitters from sitting still for too long. You were never very good at sitting still for too long. 

::

You finish A Wizard of Earthsea, and begin making your way through the rest of the worn paperbacks. You head to the library in town to get more, and on your way back you stop at the hardware store. The light fixture in the bathroom is burnt out, and the wiring needs to be replaced. This is something your body remembers how to do. While you’re there, you buy a couple more things for the cottage: a small but powerful flashlight, a length of pressure-treated lumber and nails to replace the loose second step of the porch, a better screwdriver. 

You replace the burnt-out wiring, and fix the broken porch step. You oil the squeaky hinges on the back door. You consider repainting the bathroom because you do not like the color before you remember that this is not your house. You do not have a house anymore. You wonder what happened to your apartment. You guess that people from the institute with white coats and gloves went through it, trying to pick your life apart for evidence of what you remember and how you remember it. 

You are outside the world now, and this makes everything feel strange again. 

You feel restless now, in a stranger’s house all alone. 

The woman in the library tells you when you come to return your books that the city an hour away by bus has a bigger library, has a mall and more restaurants. You think about leaving. You could. You could go to the city an hour away, or you could go to the city three hours away. Or you could go somewhere else entirely. You could pack a bag and put the key to the cottage under a flowerpot and just...walk away.

You go for a run instead, but the idea doesn’t leave your mind

::

The nightmares don’t stop completely, but they become less frequent. For the most part, you stop waking in the middle of the night in a panic because you are naked, strapped to a table in a white operating room. On the occasions that you do, you get up. You turn on the lights. You open the windows and breathe in the cool sea air. You make a cup of tea—tea, not coffee. You sit on the sofa opposite the fireplace and look up at the painting “Mountain Horopito #4” on the wall above. You study it as if you can divine meaning from scrapes and daubs of paint on the small canvas. You study it long enough to begin to see the gradations in color, the way green blends to red and to brown, the infinite and subtle changes in each leaf. 

You find the painting beautiful. You find the painting confusing. These are not mutually exclusive statements. This painting has a history. Someone created it, there was a human hand that mixed the paint and applied it with infinite care. But you can only see the finished product. No matter what you do, the process is as opaque to you as a book in a foreign language. You are approaching it afresh, devoid of prior knowledge. You do not know if you can fully understand it this way. 

But you want to try. 

So you will stay for now, until Hester can come and explain it to you. 

::


End file.
